In its new Second Edition, the innovative and ever-popular
Investigating Culture has been updated and revised to
incorporate new teacher and student feedback. Carol Delaney and
Deborah Kaspin provide an expanded introduction to cultural
anthropology that is even more accessible to students.

Revised and enhanced new edition that incorporates additional
material and classroom feedback

Accessible to a wider range of students and educational
settings

Provides a refreshing alternative to traditional textbooks by
challenging students to think in new ways and to apply ideas
of culture to their own lives

Focuses on the ways that humans orient themselves, e.g., in
space and time, according to language, food, the body, and the
symbols provided by public myth and ritual

Includes chapters that frame the central issues and provide
examples from a range of cultures, with selected readings,
additional suggested readings, and student exercises

Introduction; how culture provides orientation in the world;
what is culture and how do anthropologists investigate it? Learning
to think anthropologically.

Exercises.

Reading: Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the
Bush”.

2 Spatial Locations.

How do we situate or locate ourselves in space? Are notions
of space “universal” or are they shaped by culture?
This chapter explores these questions from macro to micro contexts,
including discussion of maps, nations, segregation, public spaces,
invisible spaces, and that space that is no place:
cyberspace.

Time is another major way we orient ourselves. What does it
mean to be on time, out of time, or in time? This chapter discusses
different cultural notions of time, the development of measuring
time and clocks, the constructionof the Western
calendar and its rootedness in a sacred worldview, and birthdays
and other markers of time.

Exercises.

Reading: Ellen Goodman, “Time Is for
Savoring”.

4 Language: We Are What We Speak.

Is language quintessentially human or do some other animals
possess it? Communication versus language. Writing. The symbolic
function and metaphor: different languages, different worlds? The
social function: what information do you obtain from a
person’s speech? How are race, class, and gender infl ected
in language?

Exercises.

Reading: Ursula LeGuin, “She Unnames
Them”.

Reading: Alan Dundes, “Seeing Is
Believing”.

5 Relatives and Relations.

Notions of kinship and kinship theory: to whom are we related
and how? Is there any truth to the idea that “blood is
thicker than water”? What constitutes a family? This chapter
also discusses different meanings of friendship, romantic
relationships, and parent–child relationships.

Exercises.

Reading: Penelope Eckert, “Symbols of Category
Membership”.

Reading: A. M. Hocart, “Kinship
Systems”.

6 Our Bodies, Our Selves.

Are we our bodies or do we have bodies? Different
concepts of the body, the gendered body, the physical body, the
social body. Techniques and modifications of the body. Tattoos.
Body parts and organ transplants. Traffic in body parts. Body
image, advertisements, and eating disorders. Bodies before and
after death.

Exercises.

Reading: Horace Miner, “Body Ritual among the
Nacirema”.

7 Food for Thought.

What constitutes food? What makes a meal? What does it mean
to say that “food is love”? Relation of food to the
environment. Fast food, slow food, genetically modifi ed food
(“Frankenfood”). Food and sex. Food and civility. Food
and religion. Cooking.

Exercises.

Reading: Jill Dubisch, “You Are What You Eat:
Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement”.

8 Clothing Matters.

Clothing does more than cover the body; it is also a cultural
index of age, gender, occupation, and class. Is it then true that
“clothes make the man”? Haute couture, sweat shops,
clothing, and the economy.

Certain people, places, events, and cultural practices become
iconic; they embody cultural myths or epitomize cultural values.
Jesse Owens. Princess Diana. Why are certain people described as
“larger than life”? The Statue of Liberty. The Beatles.
The global circulation of such icons.

Exercises.

Reading: Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man”.

Carol Delaney is Associate Professor Emerita of Cultural and
Social Anthropology at Stanford University. She is author of The
Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village
Society (1991) and Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of
Biblical Myth (1998), and is co–editor of Naturalizing
Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995, with Sylvia
Yanagisako).

Deborah Kaspin is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at
Rhode Island College and has taught at University of Virginia, Yale
University, Wheaton College, and Rhode Island College.

"Using an innovative and novel framework, Delaney's
Investigating Culture moves students through a series of
anthropological concepts and demonstrates the ways in which
universal human concepts- time, space, family, status and gender
are reformulated across the breadth of human cultural diversity.
This book draws from classical and contemporary ethnographic texts
providing students a week-by week journey through the study of
human culture- pedagogically brilliant, easy to teach and well
structured, this work provides students with engaging assignments,
topics for discussion and advanced questions for those interested
in more advanced research. I use it every year..."'

Michael Wilcox, Stanford University

PRAISE FOR FIRST EDITION

"Engaging, intelligent, and intellectually generous,
Investigating Culture introduces students to cultural
anthropology --- and reintroduces all of us to our everyday worlds
as seen through ethnographic eyes. Delaney brings together acute
observation, revelatory projects, telling and appropriate
comparisons, and an imaginative and stimulating range of readings.
A book I'm eager to teach!"

Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

"A splendid achievement. Carol Delaney has written an absorbing
and strikingly original introduction to anthropology.
Investigating Culture takes students on a self-reflexive
journey around the world and back home again. Courageous,
conversational, scholarly, and engaging."

Instructors

Permissions

To apply for permission please send your request to permissions@wiley.com with
specific details of your requirements. This should include, the Wiley title(s), and the specific portion of the content you wish to re-use
(e.g figure, table, text extract, chapter, page numbers etc), the way in which you wish to re-use it, the circulation/print run/number of people
who will have access to the content and whether this is for commercial or academic purposes. If this is a republication request please include details
of the new work in which the Wiley content will appear.